


The Vast Blue Horizon

by Alice_Majella



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-02
Updated: 2013-10-02
Packaged: 2017-12-28 05:31:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/988266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alice_Majella/pseuds/Alice_Majella
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Combeferre loves her, this ridiculous, remarkable blue box , with the farthest reaches of the universe waiting just outside her doors.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Vast Blue Horizon

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Every Century Happy fic collection. (amisdelaspace.tumblr.com)

Combeferre loves her, this ridiculous, remarkable blue box , with the farthest reaches of the universe waiting just outside her doors. Tardis, they call her, for no other reason than that Jehan woke up one morning, and declared it to be her name. So Tardis she is, and Combeferre loves her, from the intricate panel of screens and switches that place the very universe beneath his fingertips, to the pulsing, twining star that inhabits her deepest recesses, so bright that he has to look away, and so brilliant that he can’t.

The first time Combeferre sees the engine room, a spectacular twist of pipes and wires and living, breathing thing that begins as an impossible tangle, and slowly forms in his head into a logical design, and feat of engineering beyond anything he has ever imagined… He turns to Enjolras, but when he opens his mouth to put his feelings into words, only laughter bubbles from his lips. This is what science looks like.

And what is science?

Science is the progress of the human race.

Combeferre doesn’t know what sort of person could have made her – he doesn’t know if a person did at all – but it would have required a knowledge which he has never dreamed of.

He thinks they might have had a knowledge, too, with which he is all too familiar: how the mistakes of the past can constrain the progress of the future, and how her smallest triumphs can have the power to change lives.

But mistakes can turn to serendipitous triumphs, too, just as triumphs can lead to unexpected suffering. The good and the bad are not so delineated as one might like, and each moment of life influences the next.

Combeferre has always been aware of the suffering of the human race, the same way he is aware that the sky is blue, and that all men are born free and equal in rights.

He was two years old when he first asked his mother why the sky was blue.

He was four when he asked why people suffer.

When Combeferre was eight years old, woman who did their laundry died quietly of consumption while Combeferre sat by the fire in his family library reading about the refraction of light. He put down the book on optics, picked up one on human anatomy, and entered medical school nine years later.

He decided that being a doctor was not enough when a freckled fan-painter walked in to the Necker hospital and told him that he couldn’t afford six weeks off with a broken arm, or he’d be living on the streets.

Had Feuilly never broken his arm, perhaps Combeferre would never have found himself following a friendly classmate into the back room of the Musain. Perhaps he would never have suggest to the blond boy who slept on law textbooks in the back of the library that he join them, too. And perhaps things would have been very different.

Were Combeferre to save the life of that laundress, he would condemn the life of a friend. Yet who knows what became of her family without her?

In the face of it all, Combeferre knows that the fate of the human race is progress. And to ignore this tool of progress which thrums beneath his hands, beneath his feet, for fear of the dangers that it might be hold, would be to rob her of her destiny.

Thus does Combeferre cannot condemn 1789, in spite of ’93. And yet he sees 1793, and he mourns, for the history of progress cannot always be an easy one.

Revolution, says Combeferre, but civilisation. He would have ’89 without ’93, but he knows that he cannot. All the same, he will have ’89. He would have the progress of the human race without its destruction. He will have its progress. He would take the chance to change things without the risk.

He will take this chance.


End file.
